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A Trusted Leader
Combining guts, grit, and a good nature, Bonnie Kintzer is taking Trusted Media Brands (formerly Reader’s Digest Association)
in the early 1990s, held several lead- ership roles there before leaving in 2007, and ran a marketing agency called Women’s Marketing Inc. be- fore making her return to Reader’s Digest Association.
It did not come at an auspicious time for the iconic company, which was founded by DeWitt and Lila Bell Wallace in 1922. It had only re- cently emerged from a 2012 bank- ruptcy and had seen three CEO s in as many years since then. Circula- tion was declining far faster than the 1.9 percent average for the 367 US consumer magazines tracked by the Alliance for Audited Media in 2014. Reader’s Digest suffered a 35.3 percent dip in paid and verified cir- culation, dropping from 5,241,484 in June 2013 to 3,393,573 in June 2014. Meanwhile, another of the compa- ny’s magazines, Taste of Home, saw circulation plunge by 22 percent, to 2,501,098, as of June 2014, down from 3,207,340 just a year earlier. (The company states that these de- clines were due, in part, to a pur- poseful decrease in rate base.)
But Kintzer saw the potential to reverse the trends. “There were two really critical pieces that would en- able the company to grow that I saw from the outside,” she says, speak- ing with rapid-fire precision. “One was very strong products with very committed and engaged customers. The other was a lot of digital traffic that was not being fully monetized. I’m absolutely on a mission to grow this company.”
Big Decisions, Big Changes
One of Kintzer’s first major de- cisions was a dramatic one: She re- named the company Trusted Media Brands in September 2015. The new name, she believes, reflects the com- mon thread in the company’s 12 properties, which include publica- tions such as The Family Handyman, Country, and Reminisce.
Explaining her thinking, Kintzer says, “What really runs across our brands is trust. We’re the snark-free zone. We’re not here to tell you you’re doing a bad job, you need to lose weight, or your kids are in trouble.” Plus, she notes, the new name makes it easier to pitch advertisers on sev- eral brands at once. “Reader’s Digest is one of our biggest brands but not
to new heights. BOy Elaine Pofeldt
ne of Bonnie Kintzer’s for- mer bosses told her she had the charm of a talk-show host and the toughness of a drill sergeant. “It’s always nice to be charming and easygoing,
but, at the end of the day, you have got to hit your numbers and get the work done,” says Kintzer, CEO of Trusted Media Brands, the parent company of Reader’s Digest. “I’m not afraid to be the drill sergeant when it’s needed. People know I’m very passionate, but I have very high ex-
pectations. I expect a lot out of my- self and my people. I think people respond to it.”
Those qualities have come in handy since Kintzer took the helm of what was known as Reader’s Digest Association in April 2014, leading a team of 600 employees spread across its New York City headquarters, the office in White Plains (where Kintzer works), and other locations around the world. Kintzer, a Harvard Busi- ness School graduate, started work- ing at the company as a consultant
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Photographs by Stefan Radtke
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